two poems by frances klein
Landslide
a cradle-magnolia with thanks to Patrycja Humienik
The water loved you so well, loved you through your whisper-thin topsoil
until you were saturated, birch and cedar and spruce roots
swimming in silt like migrated mangroves,
and you carried that love down
to meet the reaching sea.
Who comforts the earth?
Who will comfort us?
Mountain rocks now swaddled
on the seabed. The slide a knife severing
in one clean cut our only road. We go to the water—
boats ferry husband to wife, parent to child, the hillside
wiped smooth as a pillow. We lay our heads down and dream.
Landslide II
after Tomas Transtromer
Tell me of the bare hillside
The storm-broom has swept
everything onto the highway.
A second metaphor: the hill a bare
shoulder exposed when the earth turns
in her sleep. A third: manmade roads
wiped away, a chalkboard cleaned
of notes of no consequence.
Say it plainly
Despite what we tell ourselves, we are
wild again, subject more to nature than the world
we tried to build above her.
Frances Klein (she/her) is an Alaskan poet and teacher. Klein is the author of the poetry collection Another Life (Riot in Your Throat 2025). She is a founding editor of Flight: A Literary Sampler, and editor at The Weight Journal. Klein’s flash and poetry have appeared in Best Microfictions, The London Magazine, Rattle, The Harvard Advocate, and others.